Aron Henriksson convincingly defended his Licentiate thesis on October 18, 2013. The thesis, with the title Semantic Spaces of Clinical Text – Leveraging Distributional Semantics for Natural Language Processing of Electronic Health Records, investigates the applicability and utility of distributional semantics to facilitate information extraction from electronic health records. This was demonstrated in several use-cases; finding synonyms, identifying and explaining abbreviations, detecting adverse reactions to medication, and assigning clinical codes to texts. The mined health records were written in Swedish and, in one instance, in English.
Professor Jussi Karlgren from KTH conducted the opposition. Given his extensive hands-on experience with the aforementioned techniques in other domains, both as a researcher at SICS and as a founder of the company Gavagai, Jussi led a very interesting discussion with the respondent. The opponent and the examiner had many good things to say about the thesis. The examiner from DSV was Professor Paul Johannesson. Aron’s advisors are Dr Martin Duneld and Professor Hercules Dalianis, who will continue to work with Aron in his future research studies.
Congratulations!